Tuesday, October 12, 2010

John Seddon Used to Embrace the Word Lean

With a final comment on this blog, all one has to remember is that John Seddons original site was lean-service.com.

Seddon, at that point in time, was in a market that was becoming saturated with “lean” so the two possible outcomes were to “ante up” or to “fold”. Seddon “folded” and at some point changed his companies domain and distanced his self from “Lean”.

The problem he has is that his site was “lean-service”, clearly he has since had a “crossing the rubicon” “moment”, or subsequent “epiphany”, but let no one here forget for one moment when posting that his original site was “LEAN-service.com”.

For all those acolytes, if you’d been paying attention your “chosen one” was as bought in to “lean” as Dan Jones, Jim Womac or the the next consultant. It simply turns out that at some point post 05/06 he felt that “systems thinking” would more clearly reflect his personal offering. A cynic, on the other hand, might think that it was needs must, and that you’d exit a saturated market, change the offering, and disparage a methodology that works (to whatever extent) for some organisations.